Expensive, sure - but Dyson's latest robo cleaner is a very personal affair
There's a lot to love about the 360 Heurist. It picks up from where the 360 Eye left off and is still one of the most feature rich robot vacuum cleaners available. It takes some initial work on the user's part to get the room and zone settings exactly as required but the result is a bespoke cleaning experience that's pretty much unrivalled when it comes to specific personal preferences. However, it's also pretty clumsy initially and you'll have to do a lot of tweaking to get it performing at its peak in your house. The price it's in the upper echelons of the robo cleaner price range but you do know that you're paying for tried and tested technology with the Dyson brand, and the cleaning performance is superb.
Pros
- Fantastic cleaning
- Easy to use app and Alexa on board
- Great zone cleaning preferences
- Slightly smaller than 360 Eye
Cons
- No Google Assistant
- It's a bit clumsy
- Tall design won't fit under furniture
- Wi-Fi issues
Way back in September 2018, Dyson announced a new robo vacuum, the Dyson 360 Heurist, which addressed some of the key problems of the 360 Eye, its first adventure in the space. Weirdly, for the British brand, it was a China only release though.
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Fast forward a couple of years and the Dyson 360 Heurist can now be bought in the western world, mainly in the UK, Canada and mainland Europe… you will find it on Amazon in the US but at a much more inflated price than it should be.
In the UK it retails at £799 and it’s $1,199 in Canada – so if you see it around the $1,000 mark then you’re getting a ‘good’ deal.
I put that ‘good’ in quote marks as it’s a pretty expensive machine. You can get much cheaper, great performing robot vacuum cleaners such as the Roborock S6 Pure, Roborock S4 Max and the Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge.
However – given this is Dyson’s flagship (and only) robot vacuum cleaner that’s available – it’s probably fairer to compare the price to that off the top-end Roborock, the S6 MaxV (£699.99) and the likes of the Neato D10 (£799.99) and the iRobot Roomba S9 (from (£1,099.99).
So, while it is pricey, there are bigger price-tags in the market.
With all that in mind, here is our comprehensive Dyson 360 Heurist review:
Dyson 360 Heurist: Design & build
You’ll notice that, like its predecessor the 360 Eye, the Heurist looks quite bit different to many of its rivals in this ever-expanding robot vac world.
It’s a taller, yet narrower offering than the usual fat-pancake design – measuring in at 120mm x 240mm x 230mm.
The Heurist is actually a bit more compact than the 360 Eye, not by a great deal but definitely noticeable when you place them side-by-side:

The reason for the taller-yet-smaller design, is that Dyson is more concerned with navigating obstacles like chair legs than it is with getting under furniture.
On that, it’s succeeded. The Heurist can access small crevices between furniture that rival cleaners can’t squeeze into and it also sails through chair legs like they’re not there.
However, if you have furniture with small gaps underneath them the Heurist obviously won’t be able to limbo its way in there. In my house, we have a big side cabinet that our Roborock machines have no issues navigating under but the Dyson doesn’t come close to getting involved.
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Whether that would be a problem in your house really depends on what furniture you’ve got in place and what areas you want cleaned.
If, like me, you have got side units and appliances that you do want the gap underneath cleaning then the Dyson isn’t for you. You do end up sacrificing large parts of your flooring as no-go zones due to its taller stature.
Another design aspect that sets Dyson’s robo cleaners apart is the the tank track wheels. The idea here is to make sure the robot doesn’t get stuck climbing up on rugs and the like.
This can make the Heurist a bit too ambitious though. Quite often it tries to climb over something that it really shouldn’t attempt to – such as the base of my office desk:

When this happens, the machine will start flashing an amber LED ring and you’ll be alerted to go and rescue your Heurist within the app, with step-by-step instructions to get it all running smoothly again.
The good news is you can prevent this from happening using some settings in the app, which I’ll get onto in a bit.
The 360 Eye came in a fairly dull grey color but the neon blue of the Heurist, borrowed from the popular air conditioning units the company makes, makes for a striking design. It’s personal preference if you want your robot vacuum cleaner to stand out, mind.
You’ll also notice no brushes sticking out from the edges of the Dyson – cleaning is handled by a motorised brush bar with the same carbon filaments and nylon bristles you’ll find on an upright cleaner from the company.
I did worry this might mean dirty corner spots but we needn’t have – it’s a consistently good clean.

Dyson 360 Heurist: Mapping, zone and initial setup
The Heurist has 8GB of memory on board (20x times the memory of the 360 Eye), so it is more than capable of retaining maps of your home’s layout.
However, unlike the basic mapping of the 360 Eye, the Heurist really ups the game with personalized zones and room settings.
The latest Roborock vacuum cleaners all have great zone and room mapping options, allowing you to divide rooms up, set virtual no-go areas and the like – but the Heurist trumps these with a very in-depth array of specific settings you can apply to rooms and zones.
For example, you can set areas where you want a more powerful clean (rugs need a harder suck than floorboards, for example), you can set areas to avoid (pet bowls, cables etc.), choose zones where you don’t want the brush bar to spin (think a long haired rug or a surface that might be prone to scratching) and you can also choose particular places where you don’t want the Heurist to attempt to climb… that solved my office desk issue.

To get all these settings in place is a bit of a faff though, to be honest. After the Heurist does an initial mapping process – where it basically navigates around without cleaning for a while, there’s a lot of manual work to be done on your part to choose exactly what you want to happen and where.
However, the pay-off is worth it in terms of getting a very bespoke cleaning set up arranged for your house. You don’t get this level of detail with any other robot vacuum cleaner.

Dyson 360 Heurist: Performance
The 360 Heurist has plenty of performance improvements over the original 360 to make it a better cleaner – we’ll get to those – but the most intriguing feature is night vision.
The Heurist has a ring of eight LEDs around its top camera that will ignite in poor lighting conditions, allowing the vac to carry on as normal. The 360 Eye was prone to getting lost in the dark, so this is a welcome addition.
Dyson claims the Heurist has twice the suction power of any robot cleaner and while I don’t agree that’s entirely true, we will agree that it does suck big time – and, with vacuum cleaners, that’s a good thing.
Powered by Dyson’s V2 motor, which Spins at 78,000rpm, Dyson informs us that it has 20% more suction than the 360 Eye.
If you let the Heurist loose on carpet you thought was clean. Its dust container will be full of grey filth by the time its 45 minute cycle is done. Yep, 45 minutes – that’s not a lot, we agree. However, I use our Dyson in our open plan living room / dining room / kitchen setup, and 45 minutes is just about enough.
There is also a ‘quiet’ mode, which turns down the suction power – as well as the noise – which lasts for 75 minutes.
However, even if it doesn’t quite get the job finished the Dyson is clever enough to go and charge itself and then resume the job from exactly where it left off.

It does that, and locates itself in general, using the 360 panoramic camera on the top, which is constantly scanning the room to look at where it’s going and where it still needs to visit.
There are no additional extras – virtual walls, barriers etc – that need setting up with the Dyson, it’s good to go right out of the box. That also means it’s easy to move around the house to different levels. It obviously won’t be able to find its way back to the charging station if it’s not on the floor where that’s plugged in, but it will work itself back to the exact spot where it started cleaning and wait for you to come and collect it.
I have my 360 Heurist cleaning hard flooring and a carpeted area and it performs really well on both. The hard flooring is a mock-floorboards setup, with big grooves between the planks that gather dust and grime – and the carpet is constantly covered in crumbs from our toddler’s various snacks throughout the day. The Heurist smashes through all of this though, leaving a nice gleaming floor.

Dyson 360 Heurist: Maintenance and battery
As with any Dyson vacuum cleaner – or any robot vacuum cleaner for that matter – you will have to do a bit of maintenance to keep things working well. You’ll have to untangle old hair out of the brushes, you’ll have to empty the dust bin (almost daily) and you’ll have to pop the filter out every month or so if you want to be sure that all of those micro nasties are being kept in the net and not blown out into the air.
Thankfully this all very Dyson-esque, with compartments and segments all popping apart with ease. The 330ml dust bin is on the small side but is super simple to pop out and empty.
The charging base isn’t the most robust we’ve come across, and the Heurist sometimes struggles to find the exact spot it needs to be in in order for the metallic points to be in contact for a charge.
The Heurist has dual-band Wi-Fi built in but does suffer from connection issues. Quite often I try and start a clean using the app only to find that communication to the Heurist has been lost. This was also a big problem with the 360 Eye.

Dyson 360 Heurist: Dyson Link app
The Dyson Link app gives you access to live status of your cleaner, schedules plus maps of previous cleans, and you can also remotely start a clean from your smartphone.
It’s one Dyson Link app for all your connected Dyson machines; so the Heurist lives alongside any heaters, coolers and Lightcycle lamps you might have in your household.
As mentioned, the Link app also provides pretty useful visuals and step-by-step instructions for any scenario where you might have run into trouble, such as the Heurist getting stuck somewhere and needing your assistance.
On the smart home front, there’s an Alexa skill, so you can ask your 360 Heurist to start or stop cleaning from your Echo speaker. Annoyingly, Dyson has still to add the Google Assistant to the mix.